Defending Marriage from American Freedom

Two months ago, my sister was given away to a fine gentleman I now call my brother-in-law. During the wedding ceremony, the pastor made mention of a statistic not uncommon to us all. The statistic was that approximately 50% of all marriages would end in divorce in America. A brief consideration would ponder how incredulous it is that the concept of marriage has been deduced today to being devoid of the very commitment it symbolizes.

Considering the modern civilization we boast in, there is nothing civil about the realization that our intoxication of freedom's abundance has finally penetrated the most basic social entity between the husband and wife. A covenant made empty on the drainage of contentment, an engagement made barren when interest dries, an agreement made temporal by the whims of loveless fools. Where such commitments fail to flourish, divorce's freedom is made apparent.

Freedom has promised happiness through self-appeasement. Freedom has brought us down to our core nature - that we are not inherently "good". We do not inherently look after the well-being of another person, we do not inherently live absent of the pursuit of our own contentment, we do not inherently love (in the selfless sacrificial sense it's most accurately described by). What has marriage promised that freedom could co-exist accordingly? It has only promised a faithful obligation that apparently half of us freely and most willingly choose to ignore.

So where has marriage come from that as a society today we would make it a ritualistic joke marked by hypocrisy? It has come from God. It's common malpractice to believe that God's relationship with the Church (note: by this I mean the body of fellow believers in Christ) derived itself from the institution of marriage. In reality, it was God Himself who first instituted marriage amongst men and women. "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24). Marriage was instituted as a symbolic reminder and representation of God's marriage to His Church, that He would be eternally faithful to His chosen bride. Marriage is the restraint of exclusivity.

Freedom has allowed us to be who we want to be - individuals chained to self-pleasing opportunity. It is the pursuit of a life to live for oneself, a concept that fully clashes with the self-regulated control that marriage brings through binding promise. As our society continues to push forward the lure of unregulated freedom, there is only the sinfulness of man's selfish ambition to tear at the moral fabric that we know ought to be upheld.